You know how you can download a copy of all the data Apple holds on you? For many folks, this is an academic issue — it’s interesting to know about, but of little practical value. But a tool from developer Pat Murray lets you visualize your Apple Music listening habits, using a browser-based tool.
All you need is one small file from your Apple data dump — and Murray’s Apple Music Analyser.
We’ve all taken the perfect photo, only to have to have it ruined by some unwanted element. A pole sticking out of someone’s head. A passing car in the background of an otherwise-perfect street scene. Or a political enemy in one of Stalin’s portraits.
But whereas the Soviet regime employed a team of photo retouchers to chop the gulag-bound dissidents from Stalin’s selfies, iPhone apps can remove clutter in seconds. Today we’ll see how to use my favorite: TouchRetouch.
Here’s a great little shortcut that uses the new Set Reminder action in the newest v2.1 of Apple’s Shortcuts app. Tell Siri that you want to take a nap, and it will ask you for how long. It’ll then set a timer, and schedule Do Not Disturb for the duration. Get ready to clock some serious ZZZs with our power nap shortcut.
Today’s tip uses iOS 12’s Screen Time feature to stop yourself from wasting your life on Twitter and/or Facebook (or any other app or website). Maybe you obsess over a golfing forum, or you have a Fortnite habit you just can’t shake.
If so, Screen Time can protect you from yourself. Let’s see how.
The Portrait Mode in iPhone XS is the best thing to happen to iPhone photography in quite a while. It uses the XS’ dual cameras, plus the A12 chip’s Neural Engine, to work out how far away everything is in your photos. Then, it blurs everything in the background, just as if you used a fancy big camera.
But what if you want even more blur? The iPhone XS’ Depth Control feature looks very realistic, but maybe it’s a bit too realistic? Maybe you want to really wipe out that background with some extra blur. The good news is, there are some great apps that do that.
Tweetbot 5 for iOS adds some nice modern features, including a dark theme that looks great on OLED screens. There’s also an awful, creepy new icon.
But that’s not why we’re here today. The iPhone’s best Twitter app also packs a whole bunch of secret, hidden themes for you to choose from. Here’s how to activate them.
Let’s have a bit of weekend fun today. We’re going to jam out on GarageBand for iOS with our friends. Imagine it’s 20 years ago, and you and your friends all get together with your instruments, hook them up to a little four-track cassette recorder, and get to rocking out.
Returning back to 2018, you can do something similar. GarageBand’s Jam Session lets you connect up to four iPhones and iPads together, wirelessly, and jam. All four performances are recorded one of the devices, and everything is in sync. And of course you can use any instrument available in GarageBand. One of you can take care of beats, another can lay down a fat bassline, and so on.
Let’s get started.
Preorders for the iPhone XR start tomorrow at 12:01 a.m. Pacific. If you want to be sure of getting a new handset — in the color you really want — on day one, you probably need to be quick with your preorder. If not, you could be faced with waiting for Apple to fill the backlog of orders before you finally get a new iPhone sometime near Christmas.
Luckily, we have a guide that will help you preorder your iPhone XR the right way when on October 19.
The iPhone Upgrade Program is Apple’s equivalent of a carrier’s monthly contract. You can upgrade your iPhone every year, and pay a monthly fee instead of buying the handset outright. Usually, the upgrade path is simple — there’s a new iPhone every year, and you can upgrade every year. But the iPhone X came out on November 3, 2017, so iPhone Upgrade Program participants still have at least a couple of weeks left to run on their contracts.
So how do you get the colorful iPhone XR you’re craving on launch day?
iOS 12 has a great new camera filter: Comic Book. It turns your selfies and photos into pretty convincing pen-and-ink-style drawings, complete with flat blocks of color. It even works with Animoji selfies.
But hold on one second. You won’t find this filter in your iPhone’s Camera app, or even in the Photos app. Instead, you need to fire up the Messages app and use the camera there.
Apple’s refreshed Privacy website is live, giving U.S. users the ability to download all of their data from Apple. The website explains how and why Apple products are “designed to protect your privacy.”
Apple stresses that “your data belongs to you” and insists that it never sells users’ info to advertisers or other organizations.
The website even gives users the ability to delete an Apple account — and all associated data — if desired.
If you like a photo or video on Instagram, you can like it, or you can save it to your collection. But what about just saving it? You just can’t download Instagram photos.
This week, a friend of mine posted some awesome videos he shot on tape back in the 1980s. I don’t want to dig around in Instagram’s ever-more-convoluted app just to watch them. I want to save them to my iPhone’s Photo Library. Instagram doesn’t let you save an image. Even if you copy the Instagram link using the share feature, then open that image in iPhone Safari, you can’t get at the image.
So I made a shortcut to do it for me. Check it out.
By Chris Brantner
With the NBA season’s arrival, it’s time to figure out how to watch your favorite teams. Whether you subscribe to cable or you’ve cut the cord, there are plenty of ways to watch pro basketball on your favorite Apple device.
You can opt to watch on Apple TV or you can choose a mobile device. Luckily, most cable apps and other streaming services work pretty much the same way. As long as you know the network the game is on and the time, it’s just a matter of pulling it up and rooting for your favorite team.
How would you like to have the day’s weather forecast show up on your iPhone or iPad’s lock screen every morning? Every morning, after a peaceful alarm rouses you gently from your slumber, you can look at your iPhone and see how the day’s weather will unfold. And this is all built-in, no third-party apps or hacks required. You just have to know how to switch on lock screen weather.
If you click a Google Maps link on your iPhone, it either opens in the Google Maps app or — if the app isn’t installed — it opens Google Maps in Safari. But what if you prefer to have that link open in Apple Maps? To good news is tat it’s an easy fix, using iOS 12’s new Shortcuts app. Let’s see this cool Apple Maps shortcut.
Today we’re going to make a Siri Shortcut that takes a bunch of photos you took — today, or any day — and combines them into a great-looking photo grid. It then shares that grid with friends. All you have to do it tap a button or speak a Siri command.
This is a really great way to share photos of an event, a trip to a fancy restaurant, or just an overview of your day. It also shows how easy it is to build a powerful shortcut to perform a task that would take forever to do manually in Photoshop. Let’s check it out.
Instagram has finally added proper secure authentication to its iPhone app. Previously, you could have Instagram send you a one-time login code via SMS every time you signed in. But SMS isn’t secure, making it relatively easy for people to hijack.
Now, you can use your favorite authenticator app — Google Authenticator, for instance — to generate a one-time code any time you need to sign in to Instagram.
The iPhone XS and XS Max both have an updated water-resistance rating compared to previous iPhones. The iPhone X has an IP67 rating, whereas the new models have IP68. But what does that mean? In practical terms, it means you never have to worry about dropping your iPhone in the toilet. But the code actually means a lot more than that.
Your shiny new Apple Watch is great for logging workouts. But it comes up short when you want to review your training progress and share your workout history with friends. Everything gets bundled in the Activity and Health apps on your iPhone, which are pretty basic.
That’s where third-party apps like Strava come in. Strava offers all the essential fitness analytics that Apple overlooks. The trouble is, Strava’s watch app sucks for logging workouts.
If only you could have the best of both worlds: logging your workouts with Apple’s excellent built-in Workout app, then syncing the data automatically to Strava. Well, thanks to a brilliant indie app called HealthFit, you can.
Black-and-white photos aren’t just regular photos with the color taken out. Or rather, they are exactly that, but they are also more than that. A B&W portrait can seem to say more about the subject than a colorful version, for instance. B&W is also ideal for showing more graphic images. Take a color photo of scaffolding and it looks super-dull. Take the same photo in B&W, jack up the contrast, and it becomes a stark grid — way more interesting to look at.
There’s much more to taking a B&W photo than just removing the color. For instance, did you know that a color filter will have a startling effect on a B&W photo? Let’s take a look at some of the tricks to capturing and editing stunning black-and-white images.
Instagram just added Nametags to its app, to make it easier to share your account with other people. Instead of forcing them to try to remember your Instagram username, you can just show them your Instagram Nametag, and they scan it from their own Instagram app.
It’s a neat feature, already in use on Snapchat. And — of course — you can customize your Nametag. Lets check it out.
Today we’re going to make an iPhone frame shortcut that takes your most-recent iPhone screenshot, and wraps it in a device beautiful frame. The frame will be the body of the iPhone, so it’ll look just like the iPhone pictures Apple uses on its site. This shortcut requires a little bit of setup (you have to copy some images into a folder in iCloud Drive), but after that it runs with a single tap.
You almost certainly know the shortcuts for snapping quick screenshots on your Mac. It’s ⇧⌘3 to capture the entire screen, and ⇧⌘4 to get a crosshairs cursor to select a section of the screen.
Now, there’s a new screenshot shortcut in town: ⇧⌘5. And boy is this fella fancy. If this were a western movie, ⇧⌘5 would be the young upstart blowing into town with a couple of Uzis and a pair of Kevlar chaps1. Let’s check out Mojave screenshots.
If you use Apple’s magnificent GarageBand for iOS, you will come up against one frustration over and over again — exporting stems. Or rather, not exporting stems. “Stems” is a cool music-producer term for the individual tracks in a song, and it is common practice to export them separately to either edit them in another app or send them to other people.
GarageBand on iOS doesn’t do this. It’s inexplicable. But there’s a fast and easy way to grab the stems right from your GarageBand project. You just need a copy of the magnificent AudioShare app, which costs just $3.99. Here’s how to export GarageBand stems.
For many people, the new “For You” tab in Apple’s Photos app could become the default front page for their pictures. The new feature in iOS 12 gathers everything you care about — recent pictures, sharing activity, memories and something called “Featured Photos” — into one convenient spot.
Let’s check out the Photos For You tab and see what you can do with it.